23 March 2021: The Cuomo Coverup and the Crime

Why Someone Hid Accurate Death Count for New York Nursing Homes

This transcript of the Daily Signal's podcast (here's the audio) features an interview with the nonpartisan Empire Center for Public Policy's CEO Tim Hoefner. He discusses the history of the Empire Center's Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for public COVID nursing home data, which the Cuomo administration's stonewalled. That stonewalling led the Empire Center to file a lawsuit against Team Cuomo. He describes how the Empire Center won their legal matchup with Team Cuomo:

When the attorney general's report came out and we saw that even the attorney general couldn't pry these data out of the Department of Health's hand, we followed up with a letter to the judge that had been assigned to the case and said, "Come on. What is it going to take? Even the attorney general can't get access to these data that the Department of Health is collecting on behalf of taxpayers. You need to rule. You need to rule right now."

And then within a matter of days, the ruling came out, ruled totally in the Empire Center's favor. In fact, had found that we had prevailed so significantly that we were awarded costs and fees from the Department of Health. That's significant insomuch as it means that we prevailed in a way that was unimpeachable, right?

... The case was so strong in our favor that the Department of Health had acted so poorly in this case that they were required to pay us for our time and for our costs leading up to a lawsuit and all the way through it.

The podcast later turned to the question of why the Cuomo administration engaged in its stonewalling and subsequently acknowledged false reporting of the full extent of COVID nursing home resident deaths in New York:

Largely this is a case of the cover-up worse than the crime. The executive order came down—you have to put yourself in the mind frame of what it was like here in the U.S., specifically here in New York, at the end of March. We didn't know very much. There was a lot going on. People were getting sick. People were dying. This executive order came down. Obviously, in hindsight, we can see that it was a mistake.

The reason that the Empire Center and others began asking for the outcome of this executive order was because it did appear that there was a disproportionate share of nursing home residents who were dying.

Janice is a great spokesperson for that in the worst possible way, because she lost not one, but two parents. The story of Janice's in-laws is heartbreaking.

It's part of the reason that, from an academic perspective, we wanted to get a hold of these data, which was not to play "got you," but rather to make sure that if there was a resurgence or in the next pandemic, that we learned from what happened in this one. We can't do that if we don't have access to the data.

It didn't take long after questions started to be asked for the Department of Health to proactively, I suppose, do an analysis on the data and put out a report, which they eventually did in June or July, that found, in their words, no statistical significance between the executive order and the number of deaths in the nursing homes.

But it was when they put that report out and the data that they alluded to in it that we began to see inconsistencies, then we start asking the question, well, what's happening here?

In a subsequent legislative hearing, Howard Zucker, who is the director of the Department of Health, was asked questions about this from legislative leaders and didn't have a good answer. Then it became really clear that there was something there to hide and that was the genesis for what ultimately became our FOIA request, the lawsuit, and then the data that finally came out in February.

"Janice" refers to Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean, who has been one of the most visible and active advocates calling attention to the Cuomo administration's COVID nursing home policies and scandals.

Hoefner's comments are generally well supported. We disagree on one major point and one minor point with Hoefner's recollection. For the major point, it was evident in the period before the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive that placing COVID patients in nursing homes would promote rather than slow its spread among the most vulnerable population in the state with fatal implications. Even Governor Cuomo acknowledged as much on 12 March 2020 when he blocked families from visiting relatives at nursing homes and again on 29 March 2020, just four days after his administration imposed the policy. While Hoefner is correct that "we didn't know much" about COVID-19 in March 2020, the Cuomo administration certainly knew introducing people infected with coronavirus infections into nursing homes would cause "pain and damage from this in nursing homes." He and members of his administration did it anyway.

Our minor point of disagreement is this: we do not believe the coverup is worse than the crime. We think it is has been an integral part of the crime from the beginning, because members of Team Cuomo knew they were engaged in what we would charitably call criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter in the first degree under New York state law. He and members of his administration did it anyway. (Repetition intentional.)